In software engineering and enterprise systems, patterns refer to recommendations for designing well-known solutions to well-defined problems. Anti-Patterns are described as the symptoms, or other system properties, that indicate a bad solution, or anti-pattern, was implemented for a known problem. Such prototypical micro-architecture solutions enable copying of patterns and adaptation of particular design structures to solve recurrent problems described by the copied patterns. Also, anti-patterns enable evaluation of deployed solutions to identify problems.
Pattern and anti-pattern detection has been a difficult process. It is quite possible that there are many patterns and anti-patterns that have been implemented many times, but not identified. Without being identified, patterns and anti-patterns cannot be used to assist in system design and configuration or to identify systems having design and configuration issues before problems arise.